Modern Asian Art: its construction and reception (original) (raw)

1998, Symposium: “Asian Contemporary Art Reconsidered"

1998 ‘Modern Asian Art: its construction and reception’ in Furuichi Yasuko, ed., Symposium: “Asian Contemporary Art Reconsidered”, Tokyo, The Japan Foundation, 1998. The institutional and intellectual construction of modern Asian art at its sites of origin will be summarized and comparison made with recent circuits of reception in other-than-Asian sites. In particular the role of receiving cultural formations-including funding bodies such as government and corporate foundations, museums, gatekeeper figures and gatekeeping functions, as well as the mediating function of artists themselves as major institutions of reception-will be examined in art historical perspective. A. The construction of a modern Asian art 0 The notion that there might be a modern art outside Euramerica is a beguiling but not necessarily a bewitching one. This paper will not discuss the interesting historical analogies between modern art in Asia and that in the Middle East, in Africa, or in Latin America, but will geographically confine itself to that area constructed as 'Asia' which is geographically East of the Indus valley, South of the Siberian tundra, and North of the Arafura Sea. To summarize briefly, Asian modern art can be constructed from various positions which include: 1. It is seen as a reflexive 'other' of Euramerican modernity, in some projection and extension of an'Orientalist' mis-construal of what might be the negative essence of Euramerican modernity. 2. It is seen as a 'local' or 'peripheral' modernity which negotiates a space within an overall modernism with its 'centre' in Euramerica. This is a realistic-if self-limiting-reinsertion of Asian modern art into a genealogy which privileges Euramerican origination and thereby unavoidably accepts its hegemony, if not its neo-colonial domination, as a basic premise. Elements of this modernity have been discussed as 'reverse Orientalism' or 'counterappropriation'. 3. It can be hermeneutically understood as a parallel case to the results of the transfer of Euramerican academy realism, where the 'modern' is an attribute of a stylistic penumbra the acceptance of whose various shadings can be historically traced. This approach treats modernism as a society and culture-neutral style, and tracks its distribution by art historical or quasi-archaeological methods. 4. It can be accepted as a series of discontinuous and heterogenous modernities arising from a specific structure of contact and conflict with Euramerican powers from about 1750 to 1950, where various conditions of contact, from absolute domination to precarious-if succesful-maintenance of state and cultural autonomy, led to mapping by local discourses themselves 5. It can be seen as a modality-among others-by which the world beyond Euramerica has resisted and finally overcome Euramerican impredations since the Renaissance. 6. It can be seen as a relatively isolated and autonomous series of phenomena which appear in the guise of transfers from Euramerican modernity, but are in fact reactions against it from deep strata of culture which always had their own dynamics isolated from Euramerica or indeed any other 'external' source. There is no space here to offer a critique of these six positions. My own lies between four and five. But one should note that these not purely intellectual constructs of discrete art historical data in works and artists' lives resting beyond them, just to be subsequently deployed as 'neutral' mapping constructs. These sorts of position underly the institutional practice of defining 'modern Asian art' by many modern artists and specifically many modern curators and critics since the 1950s. As such they are linked to the functions of those institutions which define them and-if it is not premature to make the Foucauldian extension-to regimes of practice which function in a broader sense as discourses of knowledge above and beyond any particular institution which may support them. Indeed if there were no institutions whose